Your View: That's a compromise? You have got to be kidding!

Wow! Stop the presses! "Tea Party Starts to Split" shouts the Monday morning page one headline. "Three House lawmakers with ties to the movement say they'd back a U.S. spending bill that doesn't center on the Affordable Care Act."

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By GREG STONE

southcoasttoday.com

By GREG STONE

Posted Oct. 9, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 11, 2013 at 12:22 PM

By GREG STONE

Posted Oct. 9, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 11, 2013 at 12:22 PM

» Social News

Wow! Stop the presses! "Tea Party Starts to Split" shouts the Monday morning page one headline. "Three House lawmakers with ties to the movement say they'd back a U.S. spending bill that doesn't center on the Affordable Care Act."

Great — this is a story I have to read. Uh-oh: What the Tea Party lawmakers actually said was, "they'd back an agreement to end the government shutdown and lift the debt ceiling if it included major revisions to U.S. tax law, significant changes to Medicare and Social Security, and other policy shifts."

You have got to be kidding. By what stretch of the imagination is this a compromise? But more importantly, by what stretch of the imagination do we think there can be any compromise with people who want to get their way through terror tactics? "Do as I want or I'll hurt a bunch of innocent people" is not a political bargaining position, it's a criminal act.

The government shutdown is not about Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. tax law, or even the budget. It is about whether or not a minority political faction can force it's will on the majority on absolutely any issue they choose simply by refusing to fund the whole government — or far more damaging still, refusing to raise the debt limit and thus threatening a worldwide economic meltdown. Yes, Bloomberg Businessweek just wrote: "A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen."

"An economic calamity like none the world has ever seen." That's the gun being held to the country's head by a small, radical faction of the Republican Party. The Republican leadership gave in to this minority because they fear them. The president can not. Not if he wants to continue to be president of a democracy. To give in means the end of majority rule. It's that simple.

The Affordable Care Act was approved by both houses of Congress in 2009 and signed by the president. It is law. The Republicans don't like it and when they got control of the House in 2010 they tried to repeal it — they failed, over and over again.

They claimed it was not constitutional, so they took it all the way to the Supreme Court — and the court ruled the Affordable Care Act was constitutional. Then in 2012, the Republicans ran a candidate for president who promised that the first thing he would do when elected would be to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He lost. That's a democracy in action. That's majority rule. The losers don't get to threaten to ruin the country because they lost at the ballot box — they get to go back to the American voters and convince them to elect more people who think the way they do. Nothing more, nothing less.

But a small faction in the Republican Party — the tea party Republicans — can't stand the Affordable Care Act. So they are trying to negate it by stripping all funding from it. And now they have proved that this is a tactic they will use to get anything they want, so they are saying they'll "compromise." They will abandon demands to withdraw funds from the Affordable Care Act as long as the Democrats agree to make major (unspecified) changes in the tax laws, Medicare, Social Security, and "other" policy issues.

Is this the model of democracy we want to project to developing countries? Is this the model of democracy we want to be governed by? That's the question we face today.

I say no. President Obama has no negotiating room on this issue. He has to defend the democratic process. He has to stand firm against people who claim to worship the Constitution, but want to subvert it for their own aims. People want to do an end run around the most fundamental democratic process there is — majority rule.

The tea party Republicans have found they can dominate the Republican Party by threatening to run against Republicans in primary elections where the turnouts are low and it is easy for a dedicated bunch of fanatics to carry the day. Fine — that's the ballot box and Republicans can correct it by getting more people to turn out in their primaries. But the tea party can not be allowed to use a back door process to shut down the government and ruin the economy hurting untold millions just because they can't win fairly in a democratic system.